August 19th, 2010
New XDe feature is all about making your life easier
The latest platform-wide free enhancement to the XDe dramatically enhances the user experience by automatically providing ready back-links to recently accessed content. Immediately available for all registered users on all XDe based sites, the new system is already integrated with many key modules.
A brief feature overview video highlights how the "Recent Drawer" works;
In effect the recent system acts in much the same way that recent documents does in most desktop software, except it tracks everything you view across all the different areas, so the cache of recent items is much larger then just a few documents and can easily be filtered based on the subject matter of interest. For example, suppose you view a news article on your web site, then manage 3 users, adjust some page content, make a few forum posts and then want to quickly reference back to the news article. With recent items all these things will already be readily accessible within the recent drawer at the top of the screen without ever needing to navigate to any new pages. In fact if you´re viewing this news article as a logged in user on this web site, you´re probably seeing the recent drawer right now (up on the very top right of the page)
The system can track content from an unlimited number of modules so will scale along with the XDe overtime. It works cross-browser and even on mobile devices where the time savings becomes even more of a benefit.
Site administrators can restrict the system only to admin users or turn it off entirely, by default it is enabled for all registered site users.
As of this publication, the following modules are integrated with Recent Items:
- news
- calendar
- user & group management
- mSTAS
- SMS
We will work to add additional modules quickly and attempt to cover the majority of the XDe Platform within the following month.
As with most recent XDe development the look and feel of the drawer is designed using the latest web technologies, as such it will look much better in more standards complaint browsers then in standards-crippled browsers like Internet Explorer. To experience the XDe´s latest user interface enhancements (and to have a better web experience in general) we always recommend upgrading to any browser other then Internet Explorer - our preference being either Firefox or Chrome.